


silver to repel evil, sapphire to ward against curses

by vulnerary



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: EdelbertTrickOrTreat, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:54:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27318094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulnerary/pseuds/vulnerary
Summary: “A demon,” Hubert amends, brushing thick bristles through the same section of hair. “And I believe she said it would gouge out your eyes before cracking into your chest cavity, if I recall correctly.”
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Edelgard von Hresvelg/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32
Collections: Edelbert Trick-or-Treat 2020





	silver to repel evil, sapphire to ward against curses

**Author's Note:**

> for @lovemapotofu! happy halloween!

“Do you recall it, the night you gave me this?”

Edelgard stares at her own reflection in the mirror, a weighted sapphire pendant dangling from a polished silver chain between her fingers. Turning the sapphire once over in the warm palm of her hand, her gaze then moves to Hubert who stands beside her, his hands busy sectioning her hair in preparation for the loose braid she favors for sleep. She hardly feels it, his fingers in the pale strands of her hair. He always takes care to be as unobtrusive as possible in his work, and on the rare occasions when the soft pads of his fingers brush against the smooth column of her neck, the contact is barely there. She imagines that if he touched her face, brushed his fingers against the rise of one of her cheekbones, it would feel the same. A skim of smooth, uncalloused fingertips. Her own against his skin would likely be more unpleasant, her hands rough from wielding Aymr, though she doubts he would shirk from the graze of them.

Hubert has always said that he admires her figure on the field, the strength with which she holds her axe and the strength behind every fall of it. Radiant, is what he had taken to calling her. She would describe herself as brutal. On occasions where she has glimpsed herself after battle, her skin a sheen of sweat and the blood of nameless soldiers, she has never felt like the sun, or the future. In those moments, she could not see past the visage of a monster that others claimed her to be.

Inscrutable, Hubert’s eyes flick upwards to meet her own in the mirror. He has never liked reminiscing about the past, held no tolerance for pointless recollections and nostalgia, and she wonders if he will not indulge her question or prove to be evasive; as slippery as his fingers through the length of her hair.

He picks up the sterling silver brush which rests upon the vanity, a decorative token given to her on the day of her ascension from a man of minor nobility. She had received innumerable coronation gifts on that day, each more extravagant than the next, but this one she had taken to. Of course, Hubert had taken it before she could use it for the first time, insisting that he be allowed to check the item for any hint of wayward magic. 

She remembers raising an eyebrow, deeming it an unnecessary precaution, but she had relented if only to appease his concern. It would have been something, if she had used it and it turned out to be a cursed object.  _ An Emperor undone by her own vanity! _ , the history books would say. But in truth, if there is someone who cares for her own beauty, it is not Edelgard herself. Rather, it is the man who fusses with one of the sections he’s made from her hair, apparently unhappy with its tangles.

(Privately, when Hubert’s gaze shifts from her own, her mouth quirks into the faint hints of a smile.)

“It would be impossible to forget, my lady. You were as distraught as I’ve ever seen you.”

Distraught is one way to put it. She remembers her eyes burning with tears, the world around her blurring and Hubert along with it. She remembers the sound of her own pathetic hiccupping sobs, and Hubert’s voice cutting through them. 

“Could you blame me?” Edelgard’s voice is wry and touched with humor now that the tears are long behind her, “I was all but convinced that a beast below the palace had designs on my still-beating heart.”

It had started something like this: maids, curiously disappearing from the service of the Hresvelg palace. She had cared for them, each of the disappeared, and could name them just by the very sound of their footsteps. Naturally, with the sound of their footfalls gone from the castle’s long corridors and halls, she had questioned it. Where they had gone. Even if none of her siblings had held the same worries, she would remember, and she would not be placated by the replacements that were quickly sent to fill the void left by their absence. And so she had sought out Hubert, who had always understood that she would never be so easily deterred from acting on behalf of others.

It had been a topic of interest to the both of them, what fate had befallen the maids. Hubert’s guess had been a simple one: perhaps there had been a summer cold passing through the ranks of staff, and in their sickness the maids had been barred from interacting with the royal children lest they spread it. On catching the tail end of their discussion, one of Edelgard’s sisters (older, with naturally curled hair a shade lighter than her own, her eyes the color of the summer sky) had stopped to stand in front of them where they were sitting together on a stone bench in the gardens. 

Rising to his feet post haste, Hubert had been quick to stand in her presence, posture switching from relaxed to rigid. At that time, Edelgard had to suppress the urge to grab onto that spindly thin wrist of his, pulling him back to where he had been comfortably seated beside her. Strange and unwarranted, the desire had puzzled her, if only because she had known Hubert to be in service of all the Hresvelg children, showing favor to none. Yet, she had still wanted him to remain beside her and only her.

It was then that her sister, older and wiser than Edelgard herself, claimed that it wasn’t a summer cold at all that had caused the mysterious changeover in staff. Instead, she named something far more sinister.

“A demon,” Hubert amends, brushing thick bristles through the same section of hair. “And I believe she said it would gouge out your eyes before cracking into your chest cavity, if I recall correctly.”

As the story goes, as they were told, a beast that was once a girl. Cursed into transformation with animal features and four rows of teeth sharp enough to ease through flesh as if it were butter. One that lived in the depths of a palace, encased in a stone coffin during the day, only to emerge at night to sate its hunger. After its hunt, it would return down into the dungeons and fold its gnarled limbs back into its resting place, and with the last of its horrid strength close the lid with bloodied claws.

Had her sister survived, Edelgard fancies that she might have been some kind of novelist. Her elder sister always had a way with words, keeping dozens of notebooks filled up with them hidden away in the depths of her room. Of course, they are all gone now, the notebooks and diaries. Her sister’s words, burned with the justification that anything she may have touched could transmit the sickness that tore through the Hresvelg siblings, leaving them dead or greatly withered in both mind and body. What a great falsehood it was, the great tragedy fabricated by her uncle. The truth of it had been and will always be that they wanted to burn out her sister’s existence as quickly as possible. To erase all of her siblings, sparing no memento, not even their ghosts which lingered in their belongings.

Their memory is something kept only by herself and Hubert, now. He often went to the market to fetch her the embossed parchment that she favored when she ran out, the very same that her sister once favored.

“Do you remember how she finished the tale? She said that our missing maids were made into sacrifices, tied to stakes underground by our own father with the assistance of the Prime Minister in the hope they would forestall the creature from venturing further up into the palace for sustenance.”

Their eyes meet in the mirror, Hubert’s lips quirked upward in a small sight of amusement. “I could believe it of the Prime Minister, he has shown himself able to commit heinous acts in the name of self-preservation.”

But not of her father who existed then as a good, if not permanently exhausted man at odds with his wayward set of children and the court who sought to supplant him.

“I had nightmares for days afterward. I would close my eyes and see the door to my chambers opening revealing a beast all too eager to tear into me. Each time I woke to concerned staff, the first thing I’d say was to fetch you. I imagine you found it exhausting, to be woken night after night at the order of a crying child.”

She had refused it, to even try to sleep until they brought Hubert to her. Though the thick waves of his hair were tousled from sleep, and his clothing askew from being pulled on in haste, his eyes were alert as they met with her own. He had pulled the stuffed chair in the corner of the room to her bedside (it would have been simpler if he sat on the mattress beside her, but the propriety instilled deep in both of them already balked against the idea), and distracted her to the best of his ability. To do this, he had employed glowing sigils of dark magic, each seal woven into existence with yet unpracticed fingers. But as imperfect as they were (and as Edelgard now knows them to be), their cast of purple light had quieted her sobs and stopped her tears. Hubert had been beside her, and she had forgotten the beast in the dungeon which promised to consume her.

“I found it worrying.” He corrects, finally satisfied with the state of her hair, moving on to braiding. “Each night I was summoned I’d find you in a sorrier state. That I could do so little to console you beyond the recounting of my own studies was endlessly frustrating.”

“I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself, after all you did find a solution. Though, you never did reveal where you procured it.”

Silver to repel evil, sapphire to ward against curses, together in a piece too fine to be bought by a child, even one of a noble house. The stone is carefully cut, faceted so that it catches light from every angle, its setting engraved with a delicate pattern. She doesn’t expect him to answer, not really. She has asked him outright before, and he has all but refused to answer.

“It belonged to my mother. My father had it commissioned it as an engagement gift.”

The words take a moment for Edelgard to process, and even when they sit correctly in her mind, she is left baffled. “Why would you…?”

“It came into my ownership after my mother died. My father said I was free to give it to whomever I wished.”

“Hubert. That hardly answers the question. If this was an engagement gift to your mother, then it is inappropriate for me to keep it.”

“And yet you have for years now, there is little point in returning it.”

She has worn it for so long that it feels a part of her, the cool strand of metal a constant comfort. Still, now knowing it’s origin, it seems criminal to keep it. If it was made as an engagement gift, it was intended as one. Given to Hubert’s father to his mother, and then from Hubert to whoever he found a partner in. She has taken so much from him already, she cannot hold his heart hostage by wearing something that was never meant to touch her skin.

She raises her hands to behind her neck, feeling for the hooked clasp on the chain, only to be stopped by Hubert who stops the motion of her hands with his own. Covers her smaller hands with his.

“Treacherous and contemptible though he was, my father was also unexpectedly sentimental. When the necklace came into my hands, he told me that I would know who to give it to when the time came.”

She holds Hubert’s gaze in the mirror, his unfaltering.

“Hubert we were  _ children _ , you couldn’t have possibly known then that you wanted to spend your life at my side.”

“I have always known my own mind, Your Majesty. In that moment, seeing your tears, I would have cut out my own heart if I believed doing so would stall them. This necklace is only a fraction of what I would give you.”

“You would give me your future?”

“I did then, and do not regret doing so now.”

Her hands slip from underneath his own and return to their place in her lap, lost for words as she stares at his reflection and wonders how he could so easily pledge himself to a crying child. Then, she realizes that it is perhaps no different from the way she had wanted for Hubert to be beside her all those years ago.

This time, she reaches for his hand, forestalling the fingers which so deftly plait the long strands of her hair. Rough, though her own fingers may be, they are perfect for clasping around his wrist, tugging gently.

“Then should I consider us engaged to be wed?”

There are no words with which to answer her, Hubert decides, lifting the link of their hands to his lips, the warmth of his mouth just gracing the back of her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter at [vulnerarie](https://twitter.com/vulnerarie)!


End file.
